When You Split the Brain, Do You Split the Person? (aeon.co)

An anonymous reader shares an article: The brain is perhaps the most complex machine in the Universe. It consists of two cerebral hemispheres, each with many different modules. Fortunately, all these separate parts are not autonomous agents. They are highly interconnected, all working in harmony to create one unique being: you. But what would happen if we destroyed this harmony? What if some modules start operating independently from the rest? Interestingly, this is not just a thought experiment; for some people, it is reality. In so-called 'split-brain' patients, the corpus callosum -- the highway for communication between the left and the right cerebral hemispheres -- is surgically severed to halt otherwise intractable epilepsy. [...] What, then, happens to the person? If the parts are no longer synchronised, does the brain still produce one person? The neuroscientists Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga set out to investigate this issue in the 1960s and '70s, and found astonishing data suggesting that when you split the brain, you split the person as well. Sperry won the Nobel prize in medicine for his split-brain work in 1981. [...] Case closed? Not to me. [...] To try to get to the bottom of things, my team at the University of Amsterdam re-visited this fundamental issue by testing two split-brain patients, evaluating whether they could respond accurately to objects in the left visual field (perceived by the right brain) while also responding verbally or with the right hand (controlled by the left brain). Astonishingly, in these two patients, we found something completely different than Sperry and Gazzaniga before us. Both patients showed full awareness of presence and location of stimuli throughout the entire visual field -- right and left, both.

Comments

Depends on what you do with each half

[houghi]

If a person has Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) we still see him as one person. Cutting a brain in half does not make a difference.
There have been people where they lost half their brain. They do not become half a person. They are just the same person with, in some cases, a complete different mentality.

So: leave it in the body, two people. Put it in two bodies: one person.

If they are born with two brains and one body, it will be seen as two persons.
These are pretty clear situations that already exist.

I feel as if the person is looking for a solution to a problem that does not exist.

Re:Depends on what you do with each half

[Anonymous Coward]

If a person has Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) we still see him as one person.

But is that the smartest, most enlightening thing to do? Does looking at them instead of him tell you more information, the same, or less?

Geez, I sometimes model people differently even without malfunctions quite like that happening. When my wife's on her period, there's a few days when she's unusually paranoid, hostile, desperately itching to turn any slightest adversity (e.g. that douchebag cut me off in traffic, or we ran out of half-and-half for the morning coffee, or someone at work didn't even try to figure out their problem) into a full-on fight, and she's generally evil. That is not how she normally is.

Part of getting through life is figuring out (or remembering) whom I'm with and walking on eggshells, vs treating her as the other person, who is totally not evil and whom I'm in love with, is reasonable and doesn't feel compelled to go to lots of extra trouble to start fights, and doesn't think that every person is an enemy.

She's two people, and that's all due to a routine phenomenon (granted, perhaps with different symptoms or at different intensity) experienced by half of all humanity, not nearly as exceptional as dissociative identity disorder, or weird brain injuries, etc.

If I didn't look at her as being two different people, I wouldn't be able to handle it. And if I didn't walk on eggshells and play special games for having conversations during that time of the month, I could literally be a rotting corpse right now (or more likely: homeless and destitute). It's a good way to look at people, good in the sense of better-performing.

If it works for women on their periods, why not for other situations too?

Brain - multi core CPU

[sinij]

Brain is more like multi-core CPU with dedicated special-purpose cores. When you split, as research shows us, you still can communicate with "talking persona" and "non-talking persona". So yes, effectively there are two "people", but they always been there. They just no longer coordinate well.

Re:On second thought

[mrbester]

An alternative is:
If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we'd be so simple we couldn't.